Microsoft Office 2010 beta ready to download

Nov 19, 2009 By Sharon Pian Chan

If you want to try out Microsoft Office 2010, the beta is available for anyone to download, the company announced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.

It also said Office Web Apps, Microsoft's online competitor to Google's Google Docs, will be available for anyone who downloads the 2010 beta.

Office Mobile 2010 is also available in beta, which you can get by going to the Marketplace for Mobile if you have a Windows phone.

An interesting new feature for Office is a Social Connector to Outlook that can pull in status updates from social networks. LinkedIn was the partner announced Wednesday at PDC. It will connect early next year. No word on Facebook or Twitter.

Also, for IT administrators, betas are available for Sharepoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010. Office Web Apps on-premise is also available to beta test if a company wants to install it on its own servers.

The final version is supposed to be available in, not surprisingly, 2010.

"People may have historically thought of Office as a desktop or PC thing," said Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of marketing for Office. "With 2010, we are really focused on giving that productivity experience across the PC and browser."

(AP) -- Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will include Outlook, a popular e-mail and calendar program that's ubiquitous on its Windows computers, in the next version of its Office suite for Apple Inc.'s Mac computers.

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